Phenomenology

Abstract

Phenomenology is a research tradition in German and French philosophy which has had an influence in many other fields and disciplines, recently also in medicine and nursing. The main idea of phenomenology is to study the structure and content of lived experience from the first-person perspective. This entry provides an overview of different ways in which phenomenology has proved useful as a method and inspiration for bioethics so far and how it could do so in the future. Phenomenological bioethics can be carried out either as an integrated part of, or as a critical perspective on, principle-based bioethics. Phenomenology can be used either to inform the application of principles by way of describing the experiences of moral dilemmas or to criticize the contemporary setup of bioethics and offer alternative approaches. The critical alternatives may be more or less radical in nature: offering alternative principles or abandoning the idea of application altogether. Phenomenological bioethics may also be viewed as an attempt to strengthen and thicken the philosophical anthropology implicitly present in contemporary bioethical studies by focusing on themes such as body, psyche, life, death, authenticity, suffering, vulnerability, empathy, compassion, integrity, dialogue, gift, and responsibility.